Really? The Davids in NS (there are three) allow you to smell every tea in stock (from the tea wall) and have samples of current season teas out to smell. There are two teas of the day which can be sampled for free and I’ve had people make samples of other teas for me. I’ve also gotten free tea and products from them, once to apologize for an inconvenience and other times as a bonus because we purchased a couple items or we had similar tastes to the salesperson. I have largely moved on from Davids flavours but I have a lot of respect for their customer service model. As with any company, I have encountered a sales person on an off day but as a whole, I’ve had extensive positive interaction.

It wasn’t a bad experience, just not as great as Adagio. I went in pretty unbiased and tried to just compare the actual experiences since I was visiting several in a short time. I think it’s interesting that they have three free samples on the front page of their website with online orders, but don’t send you home with any from the store.

Uniquity, there’s a difference between having all the teas out for people to sniff and play with, and having to interact with a sales person to check out the teas. David’s requires you to interact with a salesperson, and while some of them can be amazing (most I’ve dealt with are), some of them just aren’t as fabulous. Their returns/replacement policy is the best out of any store I’ve been in other than MEC! Most stores are set up like David’s, there are only a couple I’ve been to that have all the teas out and let you do your own thing if you’re not feeling like a people person that day. I often am not feeling like a people person, so while I respect what DavidsTea does, I don’t always go in because I don’t really want to interact with the staff.

There aren’t many tea stores here other than Davids but two of the smaller ones do have their teas out for people to sniff without going to the sales person. I can appreciate wanting to avoid staff as I often am not ‘up for’ people but I find the tea that is left out to be kinda gross, often stale and rarely aromatic. Of course, with a bigger company there are more resources to replace the tea frequently and keep everything tidy but I haven’t seen it executed well myself yet. Just shows we all react differently. :)

Honestly, I find it a little disappointing as I prefer to shop with smaller companies in person but in the tea world that rarely works out for me, as I have to go online to get quality and can’t spend my money locally. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. Thanks for explaining, I appreciate it.

I’m with you OMSsrsly. I usually prefer to be left alone when shopping. In fact I remembered that horrible training video they showed us when I worked at the body shop which ascribed to the follow the shopper around philosophy. Thankfully we were never forced to subscribe to that practice. In what universe people want to be treated like that I do not know. A brief acknowledgement that your aware of the person and pointing out any promo or new things is more than enough. If the client wants conversation/help they’ll usually let you know then. This always worked for me, I always had the highest gross sales . As well, I had many amazing conversations with clients, ranging from how to make cocoa butter, to great sociopolitical debates ( I loved how the body shop at that time actually encouraged that).

I had that kind of training in retail, too. And of course when people were giving the cold shoulder or were pretty clear they wanted to be left to browse, I’d leave them be most of the time. Of course, one time a lady was in a huge rush and wasn’t interested in chatting, she ended up being a secret shopper. Oops?

We got shopped and actually got a really good review. I was actually kind of shocked that I did well in retail because at that point in my life I was loath to spend money. My mother was born during the war and remembered rationing. My dad was more ideologically against the capital machine I think more as a form of rebellion against his father, so My mother would never by brands I usually bought vintage clothes and was personally shocked the first time someone spent over 100 on lotion. I guess I got over that because we were selling 30000$ jewelry pieces on the cruise ship. Generally people would come to me to talk about anything and everything and that generally served me well. Even in aviation most problems were prevented or de-escalated by providing a place and an openness for conversation.